Gilbert talks about how hard it can be to make art. She talks about the idea of the muse and how capricious a muse can be — arriving intermittently, never on demand. It’s the most lovely exhortation for creative people to create. In closing, she says:
Don’t be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. If your job is to dance, do your dance. If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then “Olé!” And if not, do your dance anyhow. And “Olé!” to you, nonetheless.
I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. “Olé!” to you, nonetheless, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up.
When things aren’t going your way despite your best efforts, it’s easy to self-excoriate, to nitpick the things you should have done differently. Why not, instead, say to yourself, “Olé! to you, nonetheless,” and move on?
3.
18 tough words
If you ever thought, “I like Spelling Bee, but I wish it were more dangerous,” you might enjoy 18 Words, a game in which you must rearrange jumbles of letters to form words. There are 18 rounds, with the number of letters increasing in each round.
You have only 30 seconds per round, so you get that little panic as the timer ticks down and you’re looking at LUIGNR thinking this shouldn’t be so hard, could “grunil” be a word? You can’t shuffle the letters, so you have to scrutinize the letters in whatever inscrutable arrangement you’re presented with. It takes a peculiar sort of mental calisthenics to envision the letters in a different order (and like real calisthenics, I suspect this is good for me). Take a look at a discussion of the game on Hacker News, where people offer the creator tips for making it more fun. Some people find the timer too stress-inducing, some feel the lack of a shuffle mechanism makes it too hard. How interesting to see what other players think makes a game good.
